Ro Khanna on Crime, Censorship & Congress: Fixing What’s Broken in America

Bro, how many times have you been on the pod now?

Is this number four for you?

Three or four?

No, this is my uh fifth time.

Oh, wait, sorry, I'm not Rokana.

Sorry, over to Rokana.

Sorry,

we all look the same.

You're Sri Lankan, he's Indian.

I know the difference.

We all look the same, bro.

We all look the same.

It's like you're saying to the Irish guys.

That's how I won my seat.

I just had Indian Americans, every Indian American, go knock on doors and say, I'm Rokana.

You know, they all thought I thought the candidate came to every door.

I'm doing all in.

All right, besties.

I think that was another epic discussion.

People love the interviews.

I could hear him talk for hours.

Absolutely.

Wait, crush your questions in a minute.

We are giving people brown truth data to underwrite your own opinion.

What'd you guys think?

That was fun, Paliscraft.

I'm doing all in.

I will say one of my appearances, I think this is number four, but one of them was on election night.

That's it.

And it was

with

Trump's son,

Donald Trump Jr.

And I actually ran into him in the green room right before we were doing Squawkbox, and he brought up the Pod Save interview.

So there you go, bringing the sides together.

It's been pretty amazing.

I think it's a good place to start how successful Indian Americans have become.

And a really important topic, I think, for us to kick off with maybe this time on your fourth appearance is immigration, H-1Bs.

What's your take broadly on what we're seeing out of the Trump administration on maybe trying to correct the abuse in these systems

and maybe

monetize them and maybe do you think that's a good strategy for correcting the abuse first of all there's definitely abuse second it definitely needs to be corrected the reality is that

some of the H-1B visa holders are being paid below market wages.

Some of them are not going to super talented individuals or in the jobs that actually require a lot of skill.

And I had a bill, a bipartisan bill actually, that would have reformed it, requiring paying a prevailing wage, requiring making sure that the categories actually were skilled categories.

I don't love the blanket 100,000 fee.

I think that that's not the best way to reform it.

But if, partly because it puts an unfair burden on startups, it actually may

hurt with talent.

But if you wanted to say, look, there's going to be some prevailing wage standard and we need reforms.

I'm open to that.

Do you think that the president is on the right direction then in actually trying to reform the system?

Yeah,

I think in terms of reforming the system, he's in the right direction.

I don't agree with the specifics of the way he's doing it.

Like many things, I think sometimes he identifies the right issue and he has a solution that I don't agree with.

But

the reality is that it has to be reformed.

And anyone in Silicon Valley, I mean, you guys know this.

I mean, it's been abused.

It's been abused by some of the mass IT outsourcing firms that just

have people come together.

It's been very difficult to find some of the best young minds to work at our startups, to your point, Roe, because it has been gamed.

And the people that have perfected the application process have won the H-1Bs.

And I think that that's where these systems go off the rails, because it should be, as you said, the really talented young men and women that moved to the United States supported by an American company trying to do something ambitious.

It should not be because you know how to apply multiple times through multiple shell companies.

Yeah, I agree.

And as you know, some of the outsourcing consulting companies, I don't want to go through all the names, but you know what they are, Tai Dai Consulting or Cognizant or others.

They've gamed the system and they get a bulk of those H-1Bs.

And that needs to stop and there needs to be actual talent.

But I want to make make a point.

I was just in China.

We had gone to a bipartisan delegation there.

One-third of the AI talent is in China, according to a lot of the reports.

And so I want some of those folks to come to the United States so we can stay ahead of AI.

So there are legitimate uses of the H-1B program.

And what we need to do is

fix the program so you can have the legitimate talent still coming to Silicon Valley and around the nation.

Do you think that for that cream skimming, things like national interest waivers and O1 visas and EB1s and EB5s, do you think that those are sufficient to accomplish the task of that, or it should be factored into the H-1B program itself?

I think there needs to be an H-1B program.

I don't think the national waiver and the other programs are enough.

A lot of times, you know, look how Sundar Pichai came or Satya came, who are now leading Google and Microsoft.

They came,

they studied here, and then they got an H-1B.

But I would also make it that you don't stay on an H-1B indefinitely, that we move towards a green card, which, by the way, President Trump said on your show, in one of your episodes, he said, I'm going to make sure that we actually move folks quickly to a green card.

That to me seems like a win-win because you're then not exploiting an individual.

You're going to pay them the market wage as they have flexibility of moving.

And at the same time, they're going to stay in the United States instead of going back to China or to India.

By the way, a lot of these companies,

if you just limit H-1Bs, they all have overseas, a lot of the big companies have overseas headquarters.

So they're going to just offshore the jobs instead of bringing the jobs here.

Bro,

one of the points that Jason has made really well, actually, consistently for years is

in order to fix the immigration system, I think the first thing you have to do is rebuild trust in the immigration system.

Fair point.

And one of the things that the president has done effectively now, completely sealed the border.

And I think the stat that he said is that since January, literally, there have been no illegal immigrants at the southern border.

I'm presuming it's probably similar at the northern border as well.

Can you just talk about that part of the immigration spectrum and what you think the positives and the negatives of what has happened over the last nine months?

We need a secure border.

The The border,

we let in too many people under

the Biden administration without

having the proper security.

I think the Democrats need to acknowledge that, own up to that, and say that we need to make sure that

there is a secure border.

Now, I don't agree with Trump in the way he's shut down basically all asylum claims and he's just taken it to zero.

And I don't agree with that approach.

But do I think we need it to do things to secure the border more?

I do.

Now, the question is, okay, he's done that.

I disagree with how he's secured it and in that he's basically made asylum impossible.

But will he take some of that goodwill that he's earned in terms of the trust and do two things that I think can be bipartisan in terms of immigration reform?

One is in industries like agriculture, food production, construction for people who are here, who are paying their taxes, who have been undocumented for a long time.

Give them a path to legalization.

By the way, if you want to see food prices come down, that would be one way to do that in terms of giving those folks a path to legalization.

If they're here,

no criminal record and

paid their taxes.

And I've seen him sometimes suggest that.

Yeah, he came out and said it.

He said, we have to look at it, right?

He explicitly said it.

I'm a Democrat willing to work with him on that.

And the second would be on this green card thing, which he said explicitly, which is, look, people are here.

If they've gotten

a college degree, we're paying for their education.

We want them here.

600,000 students come from, 300,000 from China.

I'm glad, by the way, the president pushed back against his own base and said that those students should still come because he got a hard time saying that they should still come.

Well, they come here, they study at Stanford, they study at Berkeley, they study at MIT or at Harvard or

at a state college.

We're basically financing in some way their education because all these universities get federal subsidies.

Wouldn't you want them to stay here and create the jobs here and investor instead of going back to China and doing it in Shanghai or Beijing?

Yeah, I think this is part of the ⁇ one of the reasons I love having you on the program, Roe, is you take a very first principled and a logical, nonpartisan approach to this.

You just gave Trump his flowers for, hey, good job closing the border, good job identifying that 80% of Americans agree with that.

I'm curious what's going on inside the Democratic Party

where a large number of people can't seem to give Trump any credit

for this basic win and then challenge him and say, hey, but this is where we have to go.

So, how does the Democratic Party look at you, your contemporaries, when you're a moderate, when you try to tone things down, when you try to take a first principled, logical approach to these issues?

How are you looking within your own party?

Are you the skunk at the garden party just for saying that Trump actually did something right?

Well, yeah, and I'm a progressive Democrat, but what I am is a progressive Democrat who tries to call balls and strikes.

And like I said, I don't agree with

all of the policies he's done to shut down the border, but it would be just foolish to think that we didn't have a problem on the border, that we

didn't have too many people coming in, and that we didn't do enough to strengthen the border.

I think that should have been Vice President Harris's answer of what she would have done differently.

And she could have even said, I learned.

We made a mistake.

We didn't have

the right

approach on border security.

Look, today I tweeted out something about how I agreed with what Trump's doing on the prescription drug issue, that he

has

a government website that is basically going to sell pharmaceutical drugs at a cheaper price.

Now, that's a policy that if Bernie Sanders had put forward or Joe Biden had put forward.

That's exactly what I was going to say, but if Bernie Sanders had put this out,

that we'd all be cheering.

I mean, it's not, is it as far as I want?

No, but it's a step in that direction.

So I guess my point is: well, why not just then say, okay, that's good?

Or I've been very critical of the president's policies on the Middle East.

And I've been critical of the policies of Biden on the Middle East.

But today, you put forth the plan that the Arab countries are

saying that Hamas should take.

So I tweeted out that Hamas should accept this, release the hostages, Israel should withdraw.

Now, that's because I'm rooting for America to succeed in peace in the Middle East.

That doesn't mean that I adopt Donald Trump's policy, but I just think we need as a party to

be honest about where

someone

is putting forward something that we may agree with and where they're not.

Now, of course, he's doing a lot of things that we could get into it that are unconstitutional.

And that's, and he puts, does antics like having Hakeem Jeffries

in a sombrero.

And

you can see why there is such anger.

He's

been Randon Carr threatening to take Jimmy Kimmel off the air.

I mean, threatening universities with their speech.

So there's reason for the anger.

But I don't think just being anti-Trump is the way back for the Democratic Party.

Yeah, go ahead.

Just diagnose this for us, because I think we've entered a phase of politics where just it seems like decorum has been lost.

And

underneath that, is it that there's hatred or is it that there's just incredible competition now to accumulate power and win elections?

What do you believe is at the root cause

of why people can't call balls and strikes?

I think it's both.

It's that, unfortunately, there has been more extremism and hate in our country.

I mean, people really have lost the ability to try to see the good in others and to say, look, we've got some humility.

We may not have all the right answers and we want to engage.

I think I used to say money in politics is our biggest problem.

Now I believe hate and extremism is our biggest problem in this country.

And then you're rewarded if you do the most outlandish things because we're in an attention economy.

And if you pick a fight, people pay attention.

And so if you're kind of sober,

you're going to lose support from your own party, your own base.

But my hope, and I hope this for both parties, that after the Trump era, and I think even Trump supporters would acknowledge he's divisive.

I mean, look at what he said at Charlie Kirk's funeral, where Erica

Kirk gives this beautiful statement of forgiveness.

And he says, well, I can't forgive.

I hate my enemies.

But after eight years of that, I really hope that we don't devolve into both sides just hating each other more, mimicking Trump's style of communication.

I hope whoever the Republicans put forward will say, look, we want to go forward.

It's a new generation.

We've had three 80-year-old presidents in a row in this country.

Like we have a new generation of governors and we're going to be aspirational and we're going to talk about positive things.

And I hope the Democrats will do that.

Who do you think those are on the Democratic side?

I think they're folks.

They're folks like Andy Bashir.

There's folks like Wes Moore.

You know,

whatever you think of the three people who are going to win in November, Mamdani, Abigail Spanberger, and Mikey Sherrill, you know, one thing all three of those campaigns have in common?

They don't spend a lot of time talking about Donald Trump.

They're talking about their own vision, their own ideas about what they want to do for their city, their state, for the country, and the world.

And that's what politics should be about.

The politics should be about, here's what my vision is.

Here's my plan.

Here's where I want to take the nation.

By the way, Roe, you know, I don't agree with Roe on Medicare for all.

I don't agree with him on where he thinks the tax rate should be.

I don't agree with him on having the state play some role in building modern factories in Ohio and this thing he calls economic patriotism.

I'm more libertarian.

I'm for deregulation.

He doesn't understand how you really grow the economy.

That's what we should be talking about.

Instead, it's just, you know, everyone's trying to see how they can curse in terms of being authentic, as if that makes you intelligent, right?

I mean, it's actually just the expression of emotion without a thought.

And

I'm hoping that we'll have a more serious politics.

You had a really great moment on a podcast I heard you on.

I can't remember which one, but you were saying, I wonder if comedy is the precursor now.

Being funny,

being witty on programs is like the precursor to running for president.

But let's talk about,

I think maybe an interesting place to go would be how the technology industry, how to win that back on the Democratic side.

You had essentially the entire

industry.

Yeah, monopoly.

Let's call it what it is.

Nine out of 10, 95 out of 100.

Democrats.

We even had Shamath.

You had Shamath.

You had Mark Pinkis.

I mean, listen, even inside the cabinet, Besson, Luttnick,

Bess Alpha.

They were all Democrats, yeah, all previous Democrats, including Trump himself.

So is there a road back?

And then, if we were just to do a little, you know, post-mortem on how the tech industry was kind of abandoned, vilified.

I know for me, as a moderate, I'm basically up until this time have been like two out of three times I voted Democrat.

Now it's like 60, 40-ish.

The banning of the billionaires, the demonization of entrepreneurs, it must have been uncomfortable for you to watch.

And obviously you see the entire

digirati at the White House having dinner.

You must be thinking to yourself, my God, Biden could have done that at any time.

He could have summoned everybody and said, hey, come, let's talk about your issues.

But instead, the industry was vilified.

So if you, I don't want to spend too much time on it, but what's...

What's your diagnosis of how that happened?

And then how does the Democratic Party win back technology and leaders and billionaires?

I do joke that I think the tech industry has become the new

aristocracy.

I look at the White House, there they are, Sundar, Tim Cook and Satya and all the group, and then the King of England, King Charles, there they are or something.

So

it's a group that obviously has a lot of stature and respect.

I guess here was my point to the Biden administration that

they didn't agree with or they ignored.

I said,

you're making a mistake if you think that getting Silicon Valley folks

on your side is about the money, because they would always say, oh, Biden's going to raise all this money.

We don't need the Valley's money.

I said, yeah, you're going to raise all the money.

And they did.

They raised tons of money.

Kamal Harris raised tons of money.

I said, that's not what it's about.

It's about culture.

I said,

there are a lot of young people in America who admire these entrepreneurs, who listen to all in, who want to build wealth, who want to build the next generation of wealth.

By the way, all crypto is, why are there so many young black and Latino folks who care about crypto?

Because frankly, it's the closest often they're going to get to a friends and family round in technology that we've got to expand economic opportunities so they have more options.

But there are a lot of people who want to have a part of the digital economy, who want to, who look up to entrepreneurs and innovators.

And you basically let Trump, this 1980s real estate guy who was kind of passe, who was wondering whether we were going to get more reruns of The Apprentice and another act on politics.

And you let him be the cool guy hanging out with all these tech folks saying, no, I'm the future.

And I said, that's the worst mistake our party has made because we've got to be the party of the future.

We've got to be the party of entrepreneurship and innovation.

And you can be, like me, a guy who says we should tax the law.

I'll just tell you one quick story.

I think it's not that.

I think it's something more basic.

When we were at that dinner,

he asked everybody, what is the biggest issue that you're dealing with?

And he goes around the table and he asks, what is a very basic and open-ended question?

And I can say this because I think it was pretty clear what happened afterwards, but one of the things that was mentioned was just the overwhelming pressure that the Europeans were putting on Google.

I don't know if you remember this.

And the day after,

Beyond making some calls, what he did was he put a pretty meaningful pressure campaign that allowed the release valve to get released so that Google had less pressure from the European regulators and less onerous terms.

I think that that's what it is.

Because when you sit with him, he's not selling an agenda.

He mostly just asks you, what's going on?

And then he says, what can I do?

And I think that that is a unique feature that many politicians, I think, have lost.

And listening.

And you said an important thing, which I just want to double click on, because I would love your perspective on this.

I do believe that President Trump views the lens through economic patriotism.

I've been largely convinced, and I think that that is a very powerful way of behaving in the world.

You know, Alex Carpeter, Allen Summit, referred to it in the spirit of Chinese Tai Chi, it's internal stability.

It's how do you make sure that you have the resources so that you have effectively infinite optionality abroad?

That makes sense to me.

So I'm just curious, what is the opposite of the economic patriotism that Trump offers that you've seen expressed in other countries, right?

The Chinese, I think it's very fair to say, had their own view of economic patriotism.

And why is the opposite of that a better model?

Well, economic patriotism has been my platform.

That's why Ben

says, you know, watch out for this kind of guy.

I've been talking about and writing about economic patriotism for years.

I would say,

let me talk about why it's different

from where Trump is, and it gets to partly your point.

I think fine, he listens, but he's not listening enough to people saying, well, the tariff policy is not going to get us to economic development.

He's not listening enough, in my view, to people who are saying that you can't just take a sledgehammer to universities and research, that that's not going to help build the economy of this country.

He's not listening enough to people who are saying don't just have all this vetting

for international students and don't insult immigrants coming to the United States.

That we do need immigrants.

Now, I agree that he gave some of those answers and all in, but overall, there hasn't been the same understanding and case for the role of immigrants in the community.

What I believe is we need a Marshall Plan for America.

And I wish that we had a White House Economic Council.

I did this bill with Marco Rubio that actually looks at Johnstown, that looks at Warren, Ohio, that looks at Milwaukee, and that says, not only advanced manufacturing, we should put tech jobs there, AI academies, there, healthcare, and let's have an economic renaissance in this country and bring the country together.

And that, to me,

we should be arguing in the parties of how we do that.

And I have a different view on some of the policies I articulated, but that should be the goal.

If you look at promoting that economic exceptionalism, there are a bunch of categories where I think the policy has diverged pretty meaningfully and paradoxically.

The most obvious example is around AI, where we've gone from a much more regimented, stage-gated way of seeing the world.

And under President Trump and our bestie, David Sachs, we've gone into a much more open mandate that acknowledges we're in a very tough competition with an extremely talented Chinese competitor.

What's your view on some of these groundbreaking areas of tech?

How do we think about protection versus how do we think about proliferation?

Well, that's a big question.

And

first, we start by saying I believe AI is going to do more good than bad in the world.

I mean, I know that's a simple statement, but

there are many people who may not agree with that.

The advances it can make in human disease and diagnosis of human disease, the advances it can make in education curriculum for young people, the advances they can make in production.

You know, one of the places we went to in

Beijing was Shaomi, the factory that makes these phones.

And I was stunned.

Shami is a, yeah, I mean, I was stunned.

It's like the AI has these machines that are basically putting together

the phone.

I mean, it's a model of the iPhone.

To your point, we had Josiah,

who is the chairman of Alibaba at the summit.

The most incredible thing that Josai said is that by government edict, essentially, they've mandated that 95% of all government institutions need to be running on AI by 2030.

And you and I both know in any Western country, if such an edict or something happened, you'd kind of just say, Let's just discount this essentially to zero.

Maybe it's like PR fluff.

But, you know, I don't know, Jason, what you thought, but I I was sitting there thinking, well, the only country that can probably pull this off is the Chinese, because if there's

top down, you can, you can, yeah, mandate it.

So to your point, Roe, like we're going to have an incredibly formidable competitor.

And so in some ways, like the infighting and the rancor just needs to get dialed down.

Otherwise, we're going to miss the conditions on the field.

And, you know, just to maybe pivot to this, you're on the verge of a shutdown.

Can you walk us through the inside baseball of what's happened over the last few days, where we are, what the sticking point is, and

what you think the odds are that this thing will get resolved and what happens if there's a shutdown?

Can you just walk us through all of that?

Sure.

Just two points on AI, though.

We do need to think about the job displacement and what we can do as a country.

I believe the federal government has to step in for young people in particular to say, look, you can work for a few years if you can't find a private sector job in helping on child care, elder care, your communities, health care, government services.

Maybe we make AI so that the DMV works better and people start to think that the government services actually are effective.

But I think that there has to be a lot of thought put in to the displacement and being

ahead of the curve.

And the only thing I'd say about China is while they're formidable, the one statistic that made me think we've got a lot of things right here that they haven't, 20% youth unemployment in China.

And that's because there are all these college graduates.

They don't want to work on a factory line.

And I teased Lutnik about screws on the iPhone or something.

You know, a lot of college graduates, they didn't want to do that in China.

And at the same time,

not everyone is going to be like making EVs.

And so in our country, you do a lot of what Chinese would say silly things, like you make dating apps and you make comedy apps and you make sports apps and you do a lot of other things and they don't have that.

And I think

that gives us a huge advantage in terms of the creativity and the culture if we can get the basics right.

Now, the government shut down the fight first is over something that I'm biased, but I fundamentally believe is a basic principle, which is if Congress passes something, like the president has to spend what Congress passes.

It's not discretionary.

You know, Federman said elections matter.

Well, the elections to Congress matter too.

And you can't.

You may just want want to explain to the audience, because I'm not sure all of us are up to speed on exactly the thing that's going to be.

So, look, Trump's had this view that, okay, spending is too high.

These agencies are wasting money.

I'm going to come in and I'm going to make certain decisions about cutting spending that Congress may have appropriated.

He did this on foreign aid.

He's done it on some of the things with the Department of Education.

We can go through other programs.

I got into an argument with Elon when he was there.

I originally said, look, I'm open to working with Doge if if there are reasonable things that we can say, but you got to do it through a process.

And they have a view.

Their view is, well, Congress is never going to do this.

So we're just going to go there and we're going to do it.

And that's not the way the Constitution works.

And so you can't expect Democrats to say, okay, we're going to give you our votes for a budget if it's all discretionary and Trump can do whatever he wants anyway with the budget.

And that's the basic fault line.

The second argument is over healthcare.

This is just just factual.

If the tax credits expire on the exchange, people who are paying about $7,000 on the exchange would go up to about $21,000.

I mean, you'd basically be kicking off a ton of people

off the exchanges.

And Democrats just can't do that.

Now, you can say, well,

you lost the election.

Then I have no problem getting rid of the filibuster.

And the Republicans have the votes in the Senate and the House and Trump.

And

they can pass the budget.

But my hope is that they will realize that these tax credits are worth saving, that they're not going to want people kicked off health care, and they're not going to want these premiums going up high, and that will be the deal.

Bro, the argument on the other side

says that the tax credits and the health care subsidies will largely go to folks that are here illegally.

Can you confirm or debunk that?

First of all, it's a very small portion of people that we're talking about.

So 90%

is not anything to do with those who are undocumented.

That's just the math, right?

I mean, so we can argue about the 10%, but we have in this country something called emergency Medicaid.

What does that mean?

If you're undocumented and you show up to the hospital, we will take care of you.

I believe that is correct.

I don't think if you're undocumented and you show up to a hospital that you should be denied care.

Well, who pays for that?

We have an emergency Medicaid program.

And I guess if you mean that when you fund Medicaid, when you fund the Affordable Care Act, that you're saying you're funding some of it for undocumented people who are showing up in emergency situations, then yeah,

you're funding that.

But

my view of it is that, let's be honest, that that's not where the big money and the budgets are.

You're talking about a small group of folks.

You can argue the cultural point about it,

but

don't make that the numbers.

So for the average person watching, listening, what technically happens if there's a shutdown?

Like what happens to their everyday lives?

Well, first of all, it's bad for some of the public servants, right?

Will the Capitol Police, will police officers get paid?

Will military get paid?

If they have a family member who is in government service, will they get paid?

And they just may, as Americans or family members, care about that.

Or you're going to have people without pay.

Second, there will be some services that'll start getting cut, right?

Like if you're flying a plane, you may not notice it for a few days, but then after a few weeks, you're saying, oh, they have less government, less flights because we don't have enough people showing up or staffing at the airports and some of the parks may shut down.

Things that involve the government that aren't national security urgent.

are going to get affected.

Let's talk a little bit about the censorship issue.

This has come up multiple times.

It's a culture issue for sure, but why are both sides so obsessed with this?

And how do we get this resolved between both sides?

And then there's another both sides issue, which is political speech that's violent, fight like hell, Trump is Hitler, the stuff that I don't hear you saying, but that we'd say.

Stephen Miller is a fascist.

Stephen Miller saying

he's gone full Trump in terms of the dueling.

I wouldn't call it full Trump.

I would just say it was real.

They'll control each other.

I mean, look, there's a way to argue.

I've gone back and forth with Stephen Miller, and

we have exchanges.

I've gone back and forth with Vice President Vance.

Sometimes I think some of it is intemperate, but the point is it's within a bound.

He's not saying, you know,

deport Roe.

And I'm not

using the words of Hitler or other things and talking about him.

I mean, you can have spirited debate in a way that isn't Pollyannish, is tough, but respects certain norms that the other person is a person of intelligence whose views you disagree with.

Is there no leadership, though, Roe, like where when you're in DC, people come together and say, you know what?

The people who have the most to lose here are us.

So it's in our best interest in terms of self-preservation for all of us to just speak in a more kind,

civil way to each other, because there are a large number of mentally ill people out there.

I believe that's like at the core of this is mentally ill people hear different things when you say fight like hell or this person's Hitler, et cetera.

And they may act on it.

And

can I say something?

I think this is an important point, but I want to just push back on that.

It's too simple to sweep it under the rug as a mental illness issue.

Like when you have somebody get assassinated, where the bullet says, hey, catch this fascist, and then less than 10 or 12 days later, you have one of the, if not the most visible leaders of the Democratic Party in all caps screaming on X, Stephen Miller is a fascist.

I think that that's just irresponsible.

I think we can all admit that that is irresponsible.

And that I think what happens is, as Rose said, the extremes have been amplified in an attention economy.

But I think it's too simple to say that they have something that can just be swept under the rug.

I think that this is a a chronic issue.

And you can both sides it.

You know, when Trump said, go fight like hell, and they went and beat police officers, you know, at the Capitol.

I don't know if you were there, Rowan, what that was like.

I was.

You were there, and like, it's pretty scary.

And that thing could have gotten out of hand.

And the Oath Keepers and Antifa, these are both radical organizations that will murder people, that will beat police.

They're very disturbed individuals in both of these groups.

So I think you can both sides this.

And every time we we see one of these crazy people, these extreme people,

it's really the same profile.

It's white men who are disconnected from reality.

So I don't know how a sane person drives into a church, kills people, and lights it on fire like we saw the other day.

No, Jason, I understand, but I'm saying there's a broad group of people that are committing these actions that are not just deranged.

They're being incited, they're being programmed, they're being pulled into behaving in ways that if they had other things, other attachments, they may not necessarily have done that.

I would agree with that.

If there was religion and family and they weren't shut in and playing video games, I agree.

Let me try to get away with that.

Anyway, Robert,

tell me

we want to hear you, Ro.

No, no, it's good.

I feel like I'm in like a therapy session with an old married couple.

This is the whole point of the podcast.

This is great.

It's at the poker table.

It's great.

Here you are at the table.

Go ahead.

Tell us your table.

Here's my view.

Obviously, it's that kind of extreme rhetoric is leading in cases of political violence, but it's more than that, right?

It's not just the Charlie Kirk assassination or January 6th or the attack on Pelosi's home.

It's also making us hate each other as Americans.

It's making us incapable of coming together to say, you know what, I agree with Donald Trump

selling pharmaceutical drugs at a cheap price because that's the direction that Bernie Sanders would go.

Like, we can't, we're not able to do that.

Why?

Because we've created such

anger and extremism and

tribalism in our politics.

And the reality is right now you're rewarded for it.

If you grab the attention and you show that you've kind of got vengeance on the other side, your poll numbers go up within your own base.

You get more contributions.

I mean, we just need to speak plainly about some of the incentives.

And if the election was in November of 2025,

the next presidential election, I think both sides would end up nominating the side that's going to take it to the other one, the own the libs from the Republicans and fight fire with fire with everything and own the MAGA folks from the Democrats.

I am hoping, I don't know if that's true, I'm hoping that people will see that this is a spiral downwards, that

fighting fire with fire leaves ashes for everyone.

That's what Emmanuel Cleaver says, and that we've got to find a different way of moving forward.

By the way, even people who agree with Trump on policies, there have been a lot of presidents in our country's history, FDR, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Obama.

Not all of them were divisive.

There's one guy who did that.

And my view is, first of all, American politics disdains a copycat.

You're probably not going to be successful just mimicking him.

And secondly, why wouldn't you return?

Why wouldn't you want this country to return to an aspirational, inspirational politics, whether your choice is candidates?

David Rowe.

I think people are going to get burned out on it.

So the other two issues I wanted to hear from you on is the censorship one and then the lawfare one.

It was pretty clear that of the six or seven cases that were done against Trump during his time off and the Biden administration was in, you know, were reaching, right?

And maybe were lawfare, would be fair to say,

were lawfare-esque.

And now you're having the exact same thing Trump doing with Comey, where he's firing the attorney general in that district putting a new one in so i'm wondering how you think about the censorship wars going back and forth and then now the lawfare ones because we as moderates and i think moderates are the ones who are swinging these elections right now you guys are we're getting very tired of it i am exhausted with the fact that neither side will stand down on censorship or on the lawfare.

What are your thoughts?

Well, on censorship, I have a particularly strong record.

When people say, what makes you a different kind of Democrat, I say free speech.

And all these people who got outraged when Jimmy Kimmel was pulled down were silent

often when Twitter was censoring the New York Post with Hunter Biden's laptop stories.

And as you may remember, you've been very consistent.

My email leaked where I said that, no, you shouldn't be pulling down that story and you shouldn't be

having the New York Post take that down.

And then I got criticized from my own side, even though I'm one of the strongest defenders of trans rights.

And we may have disagreements over my stance is because I said that comedian who was arrested at Heathrow Airport for a transphobic post should not be arrested, that you should not be arrested for that.

I got criticized from the left.

So my point is, then when I speak out and say, okay, Jimmy Kimmel shouldn't be pulled down and we shouldn't be canceling speech or going after left-wing groups, there's at least some credibility because I'm willing to say, look, our side has engaged in that kind of censorship as well, and it's wrong when either side has it.

And I think our side would have a lot more credibility in going after Trump, even if they didn't do it back then, if we just acknowledged that we've got this speech problem on our side.

It's easy to be for free speech when it's speech you like, like Kimmel.

It's hard to be for free speech.

The test is not, will you stand up for it when you like it?

It's will you stand up for it when you don't like it.

And that's

because this is, you know, I didn't like it when they did it to Trump.

There did seem to be like some situations where he was provocative or did some things that, you know, on the margins

could have gotten you a ticket, let's say.

But then you have, you know, these big judgments against him that I don't think would have been brought if he wasn't running for president again or they didn't want him to run for president again.

And now we have the same thing happen with Comey.

They're literally picking the attorney generals and firing them and putting people in who've never actually even been in front of a grand jury just to get this, you know, revenge.

And so it's, it's a pretty dark time, I think, on the lawfare front.

What do you think?

Yeah, look, I don't want to re-litigate Trump's action.

I do think he did certain things like January 6th, others, that were blatantly illegal and unconstitutional.

But I will say this, that

whoever going forward for the party should make a firm commitment that they're going to follow the law and not engage in vengeance and not engage in retribution.

And it's sad to me that we've gotten to this state.

I understand Trump feels like, okay, he won a second term.

He was spared from assassination.

He had everyone against him and he's going to get the people who he feels he was wronged by.

But it's a horrible thing for the country.

And

we've got to make it clear that we're going to move past this chapter, not that, okay, now we're going to, Democrats are going to come in and we're going to go after everyone on their side.

I mean, then we're no different than any other country.

Jumping off tangentially from lawfare, let's talk about crime for a second.

You know, you described your self-described progressive Democrat.

One of the themes around that is social justice reform.

And you're seeing some of the implications of that,

the abuse of no bail, the abuses by DAs who are letting umpteen repeat offenders out on the street.

You're now seeing how that manifests in crime, right?

Everything from this young woman from Ukraine who was brutally murdered to this young woman, the 22-year-old who's killed as part of a home invasion.

Her father gave this gripping testimony a few days ago.

Where are the Democrats on this idea of keeping the streets safe

and law and order through the lens of the social justice reforms you believe in as a progressive?

So one of the things I say is that my district, district, and I don't say this to brag, I just say this to make a point.

My district is actually one of the safest in America, right?

When you look at Fremont, Cupertino, Sunnyville, Santa Clara, and San Jose, they're all in the top 25 safe cities.

And I say that's correlated with the fact that we have five trillion-dollar companies, Apple, Google, NVIDIA, Tesla, and Broadcom.

You wouldn't have the economic prosperity of Silicon Valley if you didn't have the safety of Silicon Valley, because you wouldn't have executives living there, you wouldn't wouldn't have families living there, you wouldn't have people wanting to participate in the economy.

So, safety is essential if you believe in creating economic opportunity and economic mobility.

And I think that there is a group of pragmatic mayors now, Dan Lurie, I would say, in San Francisco, Matt Mahan in San Jose, Raj Salwan in Fremont, who recognized that the pendulum had swung too far.

That, you know, I supported that ballot initiative that was on the ballot last election that said, you know, if you've if you are committing multiple crimes of smashing into Walgreens, then you're going to be charged.

That you can't just say, okay, yeah, you can keep smashing into Walgreens, committing, taking under $1,000, and it's okay.

I don't view that as being

not progressive.

I mean, progressives, I thought the whole point is you believe in the rule of law.

Now, if you say, yeah, you shouldn't lock someone up for the rest of their life or a mandatory minimum, it's fine.

But that doesn't mean you excuse behavior that is.

How does a 14-time fentany, you know, never end up being held accountable and then is on the streets and then just savagely murder somebody?

No, no, it's a, it's totally unacceptable.

How does that happen?

I mean, it's totally unacceptable.

Totally unacceptable.

It happened with that Ukraine.

I don't remember all the details, but I think it happened with that Ukrainian girl.

It happened with this Indian American who was beheaded in Texas, where the

person had all these arrests.

And you know what?

The interesting thing is I spoke out about those, and I didn't get that much pushback from a liberal base.

So

what I don't understand is where the pressure is coming from from just saying, look, we got to be common sense in this country.

Now, I don't think the answer to that is, you know, put federal troops like Trump is.

But what the Democrats should realize, in my view, is like, is that

why is the country letting him do that,

which I don't think is constitutional or the

solution, because they're so frustrated with what's going on.

And just citing statistics, you know, going out there and saying, well, the statistics are down.

Yeah, it doesn't match people's reality.

People are smart.

And, you know, I think this is really a stupid strategy by the Democrats.

If Trump says, I'm going to send in the National Guard because you guys haven't done the job, the obvious kung fu move to redirect that energy and say, yes, here are the five places.

These are hot spots where we need those troops.

If you can put these troops on these five corners, on Turk Street, on 6th Street, that's where we need them.

And how long can we get them for before you move them to the next hotspots?

That would totally just take away what is an obvious play by the Republican Party to make the Democrats fall for the trap of we're pro-crime, we don't care about people's safety, which, by the way, is the it's just so dumb.

It's insane.

It's so dumb.

Like, why are Democrats in this respect from these specific cities, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, why are they so dumb?

Well, these are hard cities to govern.

I mean, it's not.

But it's so dumb.

They're not.

They're hard.

But, bro,

I disagree, you know, because I'm always honest.

I disagree with you on the National Guard coming there.

But I do.

I agree with you, by the way, that it's not constitutional.

But in a situation.

where people are suffering day in and day out.

What happened in Washington, D.C.

when they put those people, when they brought in the National Guard, which you did have the the right to do that, Jason.

I think everybody said, I love that.

Jason,

I think this comes down to leadership.

When you look at these big cities, there are examples of when they have been governed well, and it takes a point of view and the balls to just say, this is how it's going to be.

The last best example of this is Mike Bloomberg in New York.

I remember the first thing, the first thing Mike did was he said, soda, out.

Second thing he did, smoking, done.

It completely changed the way the world works.

If you guys remember, you used to go to bars everywhere

and you would smoke incessantly.

And even if you didn't smoke, you were subject to all this disgusting secondhand smoke.

But when Mike did that one thing, it cascaded throughout the world.

And it takes leadership for it.

Bratton did Crime Stat under Giuliani.

But anyway, Road, explain to us what the right solution here is.

Well, I think Bloomberg had a good record.

I think look at what Matt Mahan and Dan Lurie are doing closer to home.

I mean, they're saying, look, we need more police.

We need to understand that

if people have mental health issues and that they're not getting off the street again and again and again, that you can go to a court and say they need treatment, that we need to be funding

more

temporary housing, not just permanent housing.

Because, yeah, we want permanent housing long term, but that doesn't mean in the meantime

we do nothing.

And, you know, so I think that they are pragmatic.

They've acknowledged it's a problem and they're working at it.

What I don't think works is just denying people's feelings because partly it's like when I was growing up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, we used to leave our house doors unlocked.

Unlocked.

And that's the lived memory of a lot of people.

And you know, the problem of doing, denying it is if you embrace Trump's whole thing is, look, life used to be simpler in the 1960s and you could leave your doors unlocked.

You had a good job.

You worked in a manufacturing place.

You supported your family.

And you know what?

If you don't want to move backwards, because there's a lot of social progress we've made, there's a lot of great parts to our diversity and people from around the planet here, that we've got to make sure that everyone buys into the future.

And safety is first in that.

Stay on this local theme for a second.

Tell us about Mom Dani.

What is he?

You know, it's...

It's $10 billion for bodegas.

It's billions of dollars for this.

It's billions of dollars for that.

I think I heard recently he wants to charge a 2% tax on people above a certain salary.

He wants to charge any company that does business in New York City an extra tax.

And how does he come out of nowhere and just run the table on the establishment?

Well,

I'll tell you why.

And I've campaigned in candor for three candidates on the November elections, or I haven't campaigned.

I campaigned for Abigail Spanberger, who's going to win in Virginia, Mikey Sherrill, and I've supported Mamdani because of the movement he's had.

I think Mamdani's success was based on two things.

One,

the recognition that New York City was unaffordable and just speaking about that unaffordability.

So there's certain things which are pretty practical.

Like most people don't pay for the buses anyway.

They're on the buses without paying the ticket.

And if he wants to make the buses free,

that's a reasonable policy.

But he was basically saying, well, you can't afford to live in New York.

And none of the other candidates really spoke about that.

They were speaking about crime and public safety, and they weren't talking about the economy.

And the other thing is, and I have

differences on him

on the Middle East.

I'm for a two-state solution, and I've condemned globalizing Intifada.

But he was saying, look, there are too many people that are being killed in Gaza, and Nanyahu's policies are wrong.

And that resonated with people in New York City.

And so the challenge for our party is: how do we recognize the

candidate of giveaways or is he the candidate of where we realistically need to be in order to have stability?

I think he's the candidate that is sounding the five alarm fire on affordability and the loss of the American dream.

How he governs is, I think, going to be a challenge.

And I hope that he's a very talented guy.

I hope he says, okay, look, I'm going to sit down as I am with business leaders and other leaders and say,

help me achieve my goals.

Like, okay, I want to have a rent freeze on the apartments that are controlled by New York, but I also want to make sure we're doubling housing construction and building new housing.

And how do we do that?

I want to make sure that if I am increasing taxes, that there's not capital flight from New York City.

What happens if he, which is pretty clear, if after winning, he's a complete, utter disaster in how he runs that city?

What does that do to the Democratic Party?

I don't think he will be, but that would hurt us, right?

I mean, I don't think he can have a

record

that's a failure.

I think he has, in fact, a lot of the progressives are invested in him succeeding and making sure that he has a pragmatic success record.

But look, I think you would, people who just want to say, well, we should just reject Mamdani, et cetera,

they're not understanding the amount of people that he speaks for in the Democratic Party who feel like we need to tackle the economic inequality.

He speaks to young people.

He's clearly hit a note on those issues.

And then the question is, can he execute?

I remember when Dinkettz came into office, office, that was when we bottomed out in New York.

I was a teenager.

And then that's when we got Giuliani Bloomberg back to back and we cleaned up the city.

I get Dinkins' vibes.

If he doesn't, you know, actually take on the safety of the issue in addition to these other issues.

Man.

Roe, as we wrap, just one last question, which is there's a movement afoot to ban stock trading by people in Congress.

And you've been supportive of that.

And then I think that we saw something recently that said, I don't even know if you know this, but somebody that manages your money has traded like 30,000 times or something in some number.

Do you want to just address what that is and where you stand on banning stock trading and whether it's simpler to move everybody to ETFs and just call this a day?

I am totally for a stock trading ban.

I've led on that.

I don't trade stocks.

My wife's money was inherited in trusts that I'm no say over, no control over, and it's in a trust.

And the trust act would require, actually, every person to be in a trust.

And

that eliminates conflict.

So I've been very consistent about it.

And I've been one of the leaders on actually a ban on stocks.

So, what do you got?

What tip?

Any tips for us?

What do you think about that?

No, but

did you know that

somebody related to you is trading 30,000 times a year?

I have no idea.

It's like a citadel inside of Ropon.

I don't know if you know this, but it's

nothing to do with it, right?

It's not my money.

It's not, I mean, I have no, and frankly, I have no,

no, no, uh, involvement in it.

And so that's, it's tiny amounts, too.

That's really interesting.

Like it's a small trades, lots of small trades.

Anyway, whoever's working for you seems to be doing a good job for you.

No, not for me.

Working for the family.

Listen, Rokana, voice of reason, modest,

and just really

bro, last, last question, actually, last question.

There's still a pretty open field for California governor.

Have you thought about it?

And

if not, why not?

No, because a lot of, you know, I think you've got to really have spent some time in Sacramento to deal with those issues.

And a lot of my issues have been: how do we build economic prosperity in parts of the country that have been left out?

How do we

deal with our competitiveness with China and other nations?

I'm on the China Select Committee.

I'm on the House Armed Services Committee.

I've been focused on economic patriotism.

And I don't think you just run for a title.

And so the type of of person who should run is one who's going to focus on getting our utility costs down in California, who's going to focus on making our streets safer, who's going to focus on building more housing and being a YIMBY and saying that we need to do these things.

And so I think there will be good candidates emerging with those skills in California.

Bro, thank you.

Thank you.

Thanks, Bro.

Thank you.

Good to have you.

Great to see you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you, Smart.

Thank you, Jason.

Thank you, sir.

I'm going all in.